Simon Marsden 4

Sir Simon Marsden (1 December 1948 – 22 January 2012) was an English photographer.

In 1969 he went to work in London as an assistant to the Irish photographer Ruan O’Lochlainn, who specialised in film stills and record covers. O’Lochlainn’s wife, Jackie Mackay, was a master printer who had worked in New York with the portrait photographer Karsh, and Marsden learned the skills of the darkroom.

Three years later he travelled to the United States, where he bought a Greyhound bus ticket and toured the country taking photographs. He then spent two years in New York, where he had several exhibitions. On his return to Britain in 1974 he began to concentrate on the haunted sites which became his speciality.

Over the years he travelled widely — principally in Britain and Europe — and created his unusual style by using infrared film, which gave his images their ethereal, haunting atmosphere. But it was in the art of printing that he excelled — an art that is gradually disappearing in the age of digital photography.

On one occasion, while working at the Rollright Stones, the Neolithic and Bronze Age site at Long Compton, Warwickshire, Marsden suddenly felt a “force” which catapulted the camera out of his hands. He later realised he had bruises all down one arm, and was convinced that this had been an experience of the “supernatural”.